Baldur BjarnasonJun 22, 2024
“Your iPhone won’t get AI features because of the EU” is not the PR triumph Apple thinks it is.
Show threadBaldur BjarnasonJun 22, 2024

Also, those of us living in Europe already know that “you would have gotten these features at the same time as the US if it weren’t for the EU” is a fucking lie. The US always gets features first, and we only get them later… if we’re lucky

(Iceland still doesn’t get Apple TV Plus.)

Show threadjjude

@baldur

The US always gets features first, and we only get them later… if we’re lucky

Bit surprised to read sitting in India. I thought tech giants don’t release in India because of regulation.

Is it only Apple that delays or others too - AWS, Amazon, Google…?

What are the usual reasons?

Jun 22, 2024 at 10:40amWeb
Show threadBaldur BjarnasonJun 22, 2024
@jjude Google and Amazon do this as well. They’ve been doing this since well before the current EU regulatons took effect. And they even do this to Canada, which regularly gets services and features later despite arguably having the most US-friendly regulations possible outside of the US proper
Show threadBaldur BjarnasonJun 22, 2024
@jjude They usually don’t give any reasons either.
Show threadjaviJun 23, 2024
As someone who worked for a company who used to do this, it's mostly because the US is the target market of these products while they are in development, so they are always ready to launch there. But launching everywhere else needs extra effort: from the legal team looking at the local legal framework (they usually don't have any idea about), to localizing the product, to integrate with popular payment providers (this is usually a big thing with India), to scaling support to cover the local languages and timezones, etc.

Everything that's not US is an afterthought, something to do once the main market launch is over
Show threadHouston BovaJun 22, 2024
@jjude @baldur Combinations of things. With EU it tends to be compliance. In the US they can launch products more or less however they want and don’t need to have any kind of audit trail. (Although apple goes pretty above and beyond when it comes to proving the security of their software compared to most others). Other times it’s money. Americans happily pay $1600 USD for a phone. Making all the apps in all the other languages isn’t always profitable. So why do it?
Show threadjjudeJun 22, 2024

@zethtren @baldur

Americans happily pay $1600 USD for a phone. Making all the apps in all the other languages isn’t always profitable. So why do it?

More than anything the reasons are monetary.

Show threadHouston BovaJun 22, 2024

@jjude @baldur Oh yeah, 100% agree.

But it’s not like they’re GNU. They intentionally keep their products closed source so they can’t really leverage the FOSS community to build them in any meaningful way. So it only makes sense that there has to be a decent ROI for them to bother in the first place.